Victoria Stewart

Author of Hardball (March, 2011)

Before graduating from the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, Victoria Stewart was a professional stage-manager, working with David Rabe, Anne Bogart and Peter Sellars among others. Victoria was the 2008-09 recipient of a McKnight Advancement Grant at the Playwrights’ Center and she has received the Francesca Primus Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, the Martha R. Ingram Artist-in-Residence: New Work for the Theatre Fellowship, a Jerome Fellowship and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award.  She’s been in residence at Ucross/Sundance, Donmar Warehouse, the Hermitage and Hedgebrook. Her plays include Rich Girl, Hardball (SPF), 800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick, (Workhaus Collective, Hourglass Group, Live Girls Theater, named one of the top ten productions of 2009 by Citypages), LIVE GIRLS (Urban Stages, WHAT, Stage Left), Leitmotif (South Coast Rep, Page 73), Nightwatches (Overlap Productions), The Last Scene and an adaptation of Henry James’ The Bostonians. She is a producing member of the Workhaus Collective and she was one of the collaborators on Fissures (lost and found) presented at the 2010 Humana Festival. She is now working on a screenplay for HBO about the recording industry’s battle with Napster and a play based on the Mercy Watson series for the Children’s Theatre in Minneapolis.
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Where did the idea for Hardball come from?
I started Hardball after George Bush won a 2nd term in 2004. I was baffled by the election results and I decided that I needed to try to understand right wing rhetoric and what made it so effective. I was especially drawn to Ann Coulter because she’s a woman in a male-dominated field and I feel that in many ways, she sees herself as a performance artist. She often defends the most controversial things she says with, “It’s a JOKE!” and yet she’s taken seriously by a large population.

I was really intrigued by Coulter’s column that she wrote right after 9/11. Most of the column is a heart-rending eulogy for her friend, Barbara Olson, who died on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Then the column becomes glib and jokey, complaining about airplane security and then, in the last paragraph, it becomes very militant, ending with a battle cry, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” She was roundly attacked for the column and at first she tried to say her words were taken out of context, the liberal media was making too much of it, etc. But after a year or so, she began to embrace what she said. She no longer saw it as something to apologize for. That transformation was fascinating.

Funny story: my husband’s parents are very right wing and while I was working on this play (before we got married), Cory was at his parents’ house. Fox News was on and Coulter was doing her thing. Cory sat down next to his mom to watch, interested pretty much only because of Hardball. His mother turned to him and said, “Cory, that’s the girl I want you to MARRY.”

What is your favorite moment in the play?
I love the end of Act One even though it’s a pretty bleak screwed up scene with Virginia and Daniel. I was really blocked trying to rewrite the play and noodling around with image generation exercises when I came up with the moment when Virginia seduces Daniel with the video-camera. I surprised myself (which is always fun.) That scene has so many peaks and valleys – they want each other for a whole bunch of bad reasons and when they tear into each other, the gloves come off.

Who is your current playwright talent crush?
I’m a whore when it comes to playwright crushes, I’m very easy. I love the work of Allison Moore, David Adjmi, Kirsten Greenidge, Peter Gil-Sheridan, Gregory S. Moss, Melanie Marnich, Ann Marie Healy, Deborah Stein, Anne Washburn, David Hanbury, Joe Hiatt and of course, Cory Hinkle, my husband. I just heard a reading of Dan O’Brien’s new play, The Body of an American, this summer and it blew me away.

What advice would you give to aspiring playwrights?
Everyone has at least one story, find yours. Don’t be afraid to rewrite. There’s no shame in self-producing – that’s what Shakespeare did.

What kind of theater do you love?
I love scrappy, smart work. I love challenging work. I love spectacle as much as the next person but I have no problem with a bunch of interesting characters talking in a living room. That kind of work is just as hard to do well.

What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a play called Rich Girl, the third play in my Bitch Trilogy. It’s a modern day adaptation of The Heiress with a Suze Orman-like character at its center. Also, I just finished a screenplay for HBO about Napster and its battle with the recording industry. And on top of all that, I’m working on a children’s play based on the Mercy Watson series. (Mercy is a plucky pig who loves toast!)

Outside of theater, what are you really into right now?
I love music and I’m obsessed with the Minnesota band Cloud Cult. I’m reading a book by John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist who interviewed alien abductees and decided that something must have happened to them. I also have a 10 month old baby boy who is going to start to walk and talk any second so I’m pretty into him!

Do you have a favorite and least favorite word?
I use the word “obsessed” too much so it is both my favorite and least favorite word.

Why theater?
When it’s good, it’s the most immediate form of art there is.